Love: Paradox of Self and Other

Unlike fictional literature, analytic literature contains relatively little about love. Of course, there are exceptions,1 but by and large, analytical attention has addressed other, often negative, emotional states much more consistently and systematically. Perhaps it is truer to say that it has given them a higher profile, as if they were, for the clinician, more pressing, more interesting, more exciting or perhaps more easily thought about. Attention to hatred, envy, jealousy, perverse and violent feelings, anxieties, depressions and psychotic states and various forms of attacks on and retreats from the possibility of psychological transformation, has ensured that much of our analytic thinking remains focused on negative states of mind. And yet, states of loving are nothing less than the driving emotive force underpinning much of the physical development of the self and propelling much of the self's psychological development from birth until death. Love is certainly one of the primary emotions at the core of object relating, and this has deep implications for the impact of love on the relationship between patient and therapist. However, the fairly copious use of the term ‘erotic’ (for example, the ‘erotic transference’, and the far less frequently described ‘erotic countertransference’) is often a signal that the state, attitude, or feeling being designated is considered to be pathological. Hence, we see little in the analytic literature about the love that a patient might feel for their therapist, or the therapist for their patient, or indeed about the love that might be shared between them.

It would be tempting to broach an object relations account of love by making a series of theoretically accessible and easily identifiable distinctions: between erotic and passionate love on the one hand and agapaic and compassionate love on the other; between love experienced and expressed from within the paranoid/schizoid position or from within the depressive position; betwe